Why We Need Those ‘Anti-Democratic’ Superdelegates

With Hillary Clinton on the verge of officially clinching the Democratic nomination she’s already declared is hers, the raging debate over the superdelegates who’ve helped to put her over the top will shortly become moot, at least for 2016.

But for the moment, from one end of the country to the other—literally—Democrats are still taking aim at the anti-democratic nature of the 30-year-old superdelegate nominating process, whereby a House or Senate member, a state governor, a National Committee official and a nominee on the national ticket gets to vote as a convention delegate for whomever they want. Earlier this month, Maine voted to require these superdelegates to vote in accordance with the party’s caucus. A week later, Alaska urged its own superdelegates to do the same. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters that “we should be revisiting the number of votes that superdelegates have,” suggesting they should perhaps be cut in half.

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Even some of the party’s 712 superdelegates are in favor of eliminating their jobs. "Every Democrat I have talked to finds the unpledged delegate system offensive," Oregon’s Larry Taylor said this week.

No one is taking aim at the superdelegate system harder than Bernie Sanders, who has pointed to surveys showing that he beats Trump more handily than Hillary does, especially as national polls between Clinton and Trump have narrowed. Sanders also appears to be closing the gap in the biggest prize of the primary season, California. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper last Sunday, Sanders suggested that party insiders should consider these polls, despite Clinton’s clear lead among pledged delegates, and come over to him. “I’m not a fan of superdelegates, but their job is to take an objective look at reality,” Sanders said.

The argument for ditching the superdelegate idea is simple—and superficially convincing. Why should these “insiders” have the power to override the millions who voted in primaries and caucuses? Why should we return, in effect, to the back rooms and insider dealings four decades after opening the process to the people themselves?

Well, here’s why. There are some circumstances where the “will of the voters”—often the will of a plurality of voters—may well put the party on the road to a massive political defeat. Further, it may result in the nomination of a candidate who violates the most fundamental beliefs of that party. Or whose temperament and character might put a dangerous, unfit person into the Oval Office. Under those circumstances, the existence of a bloc of superdelegates means the presence of an “emergency brake,” a last chance to avoid disaster. And while it may be “undemocratic” in the narrowest sense of that term, our political system is replete with “undemocratic” elements that have served us very well.

You don’t need to resort to hypotheticals to imagine a case for superdelegates. Just look at what it has meant for the party that does not have them. The Republican Party has a relatively small number of “automatic” delegates—three from each state and territory. These 250 delegates amount to 7 percent of the total (The Democratic supers represent about 15 percent of their total). More crucially, Republicans do not permit these delegates to vote their conscience or judgment or preference. They are bound by party rules to vote for whoever won the most votes in their states.

Now indulge me in a small piece of alternate history. Suppose the Republicans had the same rules in place as the Democrats have. Suppose that every GOP governor, House, and Senate member had a ticket to Cleveland. Suppose these delegates were free to vote as they chose. Finally, suppose the GOP’s delegate allocation rules mirrored the Democrats: strict proportionality, no winner-take-all, or winner-take-most states.

Under these circumstances, Republicans would convene in July with Trump having roughly 40 percent of pledged delegates (he won slightly more than 40 percent of primary votes), and with several hundred unpledged delegates drawn from the ranks of elected and party officials.

Should they be under political or moral suasion to cast their votes for Trump? In the first place, they could argue that majority of voters chose not to vote for Trump … a fact that would be reflected with proportional delegate-allocation rules. (If Trump came to the convention with a majority of pledged delegates, that would be a very different circumstance). But more importantly, their role as superdelegates would require them to think about what it is their party stands for.

Superdelegates, remember, are not some shadowy group of power brokers out of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” They’ve been elected to significant office, or have worked as foot soldiers in their party for years. Presumably, they have some sense of what they want their party to stand for. If they were to conclude that Trump breaks with the most fundamental canons of their party—and there’s plenty of evidence to back that view—that judgment would represent the considered opinions of hundreds of people with serious credibility in speaking for their party.

In “non-alternate” history, of course, it’s the Democrats who will bring 700-plus free-agent superdelegates to their convention. In fact, these individuals are not inclined to cast their votes based simply on whom they prefer. To the contrary, going against the will of pledged delegates has proven to be a near-non-existent practice. In 2008, the great majority of superdelegates started out firmly in Hillary Clinton’s corner. But by convention time, with Obama holding a narrow lead in pledged delegates and ending in a virtual popular-vote dead heat, the superdelegates overwhelmingly moved to Obama’s side; it was one key reason why Clinton ended her 2008 campaign in June, rather than fighting all the way to the convention.

But what if a Democratic convention was thrown into chaos by a “Black Swan” event that took the presumptive nominee out of contention: illness, injury, scandal? What if a trio or quartet of contenders came to the convention with no clear front-runner, and with the prospect of a week of turmoil? In those highly unlikely but conceivable circumstances, a bloc of experienced officials and officeholders would serve as critical ballast in preventing chaos—or a late lurch to a candidate who went against the root beliefs of the Democratic Party. You can think of these superdelegates as an emergency brake, to be deployed only under the most extreme of conditions.

Some party officials also argue that the nominating process simply doesn’t lend itself to more democracy, as radical as that idea may seem. “The nomination of a candidate is a political party function, not a public function,” says longtime Democratic operative Elaine Kamarck, who has spent decades on the party’s Rules Committee. “There is no ‘constitutional right’ to nominate a candidate. In fact, for most of American history political parties nominated through conventions that were mostly closed to the public. No other democracy includes this degree of public participation in its nominating process.”

Detractors of the idea will argue that replacing party insiders with voters is part of a pattern in American life where decisions once made by a few have now been shifted over to voters. The people vote for presidential electors in every state, even though the Constitution lets the state legislatures decide how to pick electors. The 17th Amendment put the power to elect senators into the hands of the people. Still, there are plenty of other areas where “undemocratic” processes remain. It takes a two-third vote in Congress to override a veto; a two-thirds vote in the Senate to ratify a treaty. An unelected Supreme Court still decides what the Constitution means, even if a president and a supermajority of Congress disagree.

If a party is simply a vessel into which is poured any candidate, with any set of ideas, who manages to win enough votes, then yes, superdelegates should have no standing. But there’s another view, expressed by Dwight Eisenhower, who said “a political party without principles is nothing more than a conspiracy to seize power.” If that idea is right, then superdelegates do have a role, one they may rarely if ever play, but which could prove critical to the party—and to the country.